Alone on a Wide Wide Sea, Vol. 3 (of 3)

by William Clark Russell

I hung my head. I could not look into the face of her grief and find words.

And now again the poor woman reproached herself for having brought her child to sea when it was too late. She talked indeed as though she had overheard what Mr. McEwan had said to me on the previous day, or as though he had repeated his discourse to her.

‘She would have been comfortable at home,’ she exclaimed amidst her sobs. ‘Her rest is broken by the narrow bunk she lies in, and she is distressed by the movements of the ship. At home she would lie peacefully in her own bedroom, she would be surrounded by familiar objects, friends would come and sit with her, and—oh, Agnes!’ She stopped in her speech as though a spasm had wrenched her heart.

I knew what was in her mind, and the tears sprang into my eyes.

‘Her grave,’ continued Mrs. Lee in a whisper, ‘would not be far away from me. I should be able to visit it, to see that it is tended as her sister’s is: but——’ She stopped again in her speech and directed her eyes at one of the large circular windows through which, as the ship rolled, we could now and again catch a sight of the glassy volumes of water.

While she talked of her dying child the breakfast-bell rang. She rose and said: ‘I cannot sit at the table. I cannot bear to be asked questions about Alice, though they are kindly meant. Come to me when you have breakfasted,’ and she returned to her berth.

I felt, now that the mother was without hope, that there was no hope indeed. My own grief was so keen that I was as unequal to the task of sitting at the breakfast table as Mrs. Lee, and after drinking a cup of tea, which one of the stewards brought to me before the passengers assembled, I slipped downstairs to my cabin there to wait until it should be time to visit Alice. My low spirits were not only owing to the news which Mrs. Lee had given me: I had passed a miserable night disturbed by many shapeless undeterminable dreams, and broken by long passages of waking thought. The gipsy woman’s repeated deliberate assurance that I was not only a wife but a mother also influenced me as though her words were the truth itself. A secret voice within me was for ever whispering, ‘It is so! It is so!’ and I cannot express how dreadful was the anguish of my mind as I sought in the void within for any, the least, stir of shadow to which I could give some form of memory.

And I was sensible too of a heartache as of yearning, though I knew not what I yearned for. I sought to explain to myself this subtle craving by saying, ‘I am a mother and I yearn for my children;’ and yet my children were to me then as though they had never been born! What, then, did this sense of yearning signify? Was it a desire put into my head by the gipsy woman’s talk—first, the belief that I was a mother as she had said, and then a craving to know whether or not I had left children behind me in my unknown home? Or was it the deep, unfailing, deathless, maternal instinct whose accents were sounding to my heart out of the darkness that was upon my mind, as the whisper of a spirit falls upon the waking ear in the blackness of the night, serving as an impulse and an inspiration, though the listener knows not whence the sound proceeds nor what it is?

It happened as Mrs. Lee had feared. As the wife of a shipowner she had met many seafaring men in her time, and she talked of the sea with something of the knowledge of an experienced ocean traveller. The calm weather which she had dreaded happened. For many days, whose number my memory does not carry, the sea stretched flat and lifeless round about the ship, and the rim of it was dim with the faint blue haze of heat whilst the central sky was a blaze of white light. Faint airs called catspaws occasionally tarnished the table-flat plain of the ocean; but so weak were these draughts that they expired long before they reached the ship, and for hours and for days the Deal Castle sat upright upon the water without motion except a small swaying of her mast-heads, and there was so perfect a reflection of her fabric of black sides and star-white canvas under her that one might have believed on gazing over the side that she rested on a sheet of looking-glass.

No sail could heave into view in such stagnant weather. Never was the hot, blurred edge of the ocean broken by the thread-like shadowing of a steamer’s smoke. There was nothing to see but water, and there was nothing for the passengers to do but to lounge and eat and sleep and grumble. The heat told fearfully on Alice Lee. The saloon and berths were unendurably hot, and the doctor ordered the girl to be carried on deck on a couch. She begged not to be disturbed; her mother entreated her to allow the people to carry her on deck, and then she consented; but when they put their hands upon her she fainted, and so deep and long was her swoon that we feared she had died. The doctor then directed that she should be left as she was.